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Negative interest rates may or may not be a thing of the past (many thought that the ECB had learned its lesson, and then Vitor Constancio wrote a blog post showing that the ECB hasn’t learned a damn thing), but the confusion about their significance remains. Here is Deutsche Bank’s Dominic Konstam explaining how, among many other things including why Europe will need to “tax” cash before this final Keynesian experiment is finally over, negative rates are merely the logical failure of globalization.

Misconceptions about negative rates

Understanding how negative rates may or may not help economic growth is much more complex than most central bankers and investors probably appreciate. Ultimately the confusion resides around differences in view on the theory of money. In a classical world, money supply multiplied by a constant velocity of circulation equates to nominal growth. In a Keynesian world, velocity is not necessarily constant – specifically for Keynes, there is a money demand function (liquidity preference) and therefore a theory of interest that allows for a liquidity trap whereby increasing money supply does not lead to higher nominal growth as the increase in money is hoarded. The interest rate (or inverse of the price of bonds) becomes sticky because at low rates, for infinitesimal expectations of any further rise in bond prices and a further fall in interest rates, demand for money tends to infinity. In Gesell’s world money supply itself becomes inversely correlated with velocity of circulation due to money characteristics being superior to goods (or commodities). There are costs to storage that money does not have and so interest on money capital sets a bar to interest on real capital that produces goods. This is similar to Keynes’ concept of the marginal efficiency of capital schedule being separate from the interest rate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Terrifying Prospect” Of A Triumph Of Politics Over Economics

March 9, 2016

The “Terrifying Prospect” Of A Triumph Of Politics Over Economics

The Triumph of Politics

All of life’s odds aren’t 3:2, but that’s how you’re supposed to bet, or so they say. They are not saying that so much anymore, or saying that history rhymes, or that nothing’s new under the sun. More and more theys seem to be figuring out that past economic and market experiences can’t be extrapolated forward – a terrifying prospect for the social and political order.

Consider today’s realities:

Global economies have grown to their current scale thanks to a glorious secular expansion of worldwide credit – credit unreserved with bank assets and deposits; credit extended to brand new capitalists; credit that can never be extinguished without significant debt deflation or hyper monetary inflation

Economies no longer form sufficient capital to sustain their scales or to justify broad asset values in real terms

Markets cannot price assets fairly in real terms without risking significant declines in collateral values supporting them and their underlying economies

Politicians that used to anguish (rhetorically) over the right mix of potential fiscal policies, ostensibly to get things back on track (as if somehow finding the right path would have actually been legislated into existence), have come to realize the limits of their power to have a meaningful impact

Monetary authorities have become the only game in town,assassinating all economic logic so they may juggle public expectations in the hope – so far successfully executed – that neither man nor nature will be the wiser.

The good news for policy makers is that man remains collectively unaware and vacuous; the bad news is that nature abhors a vacuum. The massive scale of economies relative to necessary production (not to mention already embedded systemic leverage) suggests this time is truly different.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Helicopter Money Can’t Save Us: We’ve Already Been Doing It For 8 Years

March 7, 2016

Why Helicopter Money Can’t Save Us: We’ve Already Been Doing It For 8 Years

There’s a lot of talk going around these days about “helicopter money.”

For those unfamiliar, it’s billed as a kind of last Keynesian resort when ZIRP, NIRP, and QE have all failed to boost aggregate demand and juice inflation.

For instance, HSBC said the following late last month: “If central banks do not achieve their medium-term inflation targets through NIRP, they may have to adopt other policy measures: looser fiscal policy and even helicopter money are possible in scenarios beyond QE and negative rates.”

And here’s Citi’s Willem Buiter from Septemeber: “Helicopter money drops would be the best instrument to tackle a downturn in all DMs.”

So what exactly is this “helicopter money” that is supposed to provide a lifeline when all of central banks’ other forays into unconventional policy have demonstrably failed? Well, here’s Buiter to explain how it works in theory (this is the China example, but it’s the same concept everywhere else):

Now whether it’s “fiscally, financially and macro-economically prudent in current circumstances,” (or any circumstances for that matter) is certainly questionable, but what’s not questionable is that it is indeed feasible.

How do we know? Because we’ve been doing it for 8 long years.

If you think about what Buiter says above, it’s simply deficit financing. The government prints one paper liability and buys it from itself with another paper liability that the government also prints.

Sound familiar? It’s called QE.

The first-best would be for the central government to issue bonds to fund this fiscal stimulus and for the PBOC to buy them and either hold them forever or cancel them, with the PBOC monetizing these Treasury bond purchases. Such a ‘helicopter money drop’ is fiscally, financially and macro-economically prudent in current circumstances, with inflation well below target and likely to fall further.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deutsche Bank Discovers Kuroda’s NIRP Paradox

March 7, 2016

Deutsche Bank Discovers Kuroda’s NIRP Paradox

Last October, BofA looked at Europe’s €2.6 trillion in negative-yielding debt and discovered something “stunning”: Savings rates were going up not down.

Don’t believe us, just have a look at these three charts:

But how could that be? By all accounts – or, should we say, by all conventional Keynesian/ textbook accounts – negative rates should force people out of savings and into higher yielding vehicles or else into goods and services which “rational” actors will assume they should buy now before they get more expensive in the future as inflation rises or at least before the money they’re sitting on now yields less than it currently is.

Well inflation never rose for a variety of reasons (not the least of which was that QE and ZIRP actually contributed to the global disinflationary impulse) and nothing will incentivize savers to keep their money in the bank like the expectation of deflation.

Well, almost nothing. There’s also this (again, from BofA): “Ultra-low rates may perversely be driving a greater propensity for consumers to save as retirement income becomes more uncertain.”

Why that’s “perverse,” we’re not entirely sure. Fixed income yields nothing, and rates on savings accounts are nothing. Which means if you’re worried about your nest egg and aren’t keen on chasing the stock bubble higher or buying bonds in hopes that capital appreciation will make up for rock-bottom coupons (i.e. chasing the bond bubble), then as Gene Wilder would say, “you get nothing.” And that makes you nervous if you’re thinking about retirement. And nervous people don’t spend. Nervous people save.

Deutsche Bank has figured out this very same dynamic. In a note out Friday, the bank remarks that declining rates have generally managed to bring consumption forward.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

According To Morgan Stanley This Is The Biggest Threat To Deutsche Bank’s Survival

February 24, 2016

According To Morgan Stanley This Is The Biggest Threat To Deutsche Bank’s Survival

Two weeks ago, on one of the slides in a Morgan Stanley presentation, we found something which we thought was quite disturbing. According to the bank’s head of EMEA research Huw van Steenis, while in Davos, he sat “next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers’ secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy.”

As it turns out, just like Deutsche Bank – which first warned about the dire consequences of NIRP to Europe’s banks – Morgan Stanley is likewise “concerned” and for good reason.

With the ECB set to unveil its next set of unconventional measures during its next meeting on March 10 among which almost certainly even more negative rates (for the simple reason that a vast amount of monetizable govt bonds are trading with a yield below the ECB’s deposit rate floor and are ineligible for purchase) the ECB may cut said rates anywhere between 10bps, 20bps, or even more (thereby sending those same bond yields plunging ever further into negative territory).

As Morgan Stanley warns that any substantial rate cut by the ECB will only make matters worse. As it says, “Beyond a 10-20bp ECB Deposit Rate Cut, We Believe Impacts on Earnings Could Be Exponential.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash

February 18, 2016

This Is The Real Reason For The War On Cash

Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal,

These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.

Mario Draghi fired the latest salvo on Monday when he said the European Central Bank would like to ban €500 notes. A day later Harvard economist and Democratic Party favorite Larry Summers declared that it’s time to kill the $100 bill, which would mean goodbye to Ben Franklin. Alexander Hamilton may soon—and shamefully—be replaced on the $10 bill, but at least the 10-spots would exist for a while longer. Ol’ Ben would be banished from the currency the way dead white males like him are banned from the history books.

Limits on cash transactions have been spreading in Europe since the 2008 financial panic, ostensibly to crack down on crime and tax avoidance. Italy has made it illegal to pay cash for anything worth more than €1,000 ($1,116), while France cut its limit to €1,000 from €3,000 last year. British merchants accepting more than €15,000 in cash per transaction must first register with the tax authorities. Fines for violators can run into the thousands of euros. Germany’s Deputy Finance Minister Michael Meister recently proposed a €5,000 cap on cash transactions. Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted last month that cash won’t survive another decade.

The enemies of cash claim that only crooks and cranks need large-denomination bills. They want large transactions to be made electronically so government can follow them. Yet these are some of the same European politicians who blew a gasket when they learned that U.S. counterterrorist officials were monitoring money through the Swift global system. Criminals will find a way, large bills or not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deranged Central Bankers Blowing Up the World

February 15, 2016

DERANGED CENTRAL BANKERS BLOWING UP THE WORLD

It is now self-evident to any sentient being (excludes CNBC shills, Wall Street shyster economists, and Keynesian loving politicians) the mountainous level of unpayable global debt is about to crash down like an avalanche upon hundreds of millions of willfully ignorant citizens who trusted their politician leaders and the central bankers who created the debt out of thin air. McKinsey produced a report last year showing the world had added $57 trillion of debt between 2008 and the 2nd quarter of 2014, with global debt to GDP reaching 286%.

The global economy has only deteriorated since mid-2014, with politicians and central bankers accelerating the issuance of debt. These deranged psychopaths have added in excess of $70 trillion of debt in the last eight years, a 50% increase. With $142 trillion of global debt enough to collapse the global economy in 2008, only a lunatic would implement a “solution” that increased global debt to $212 trillion over the next seven years thinking that would solve a problem created by too much debt.

The truth is, these central bankers and captured politicians knew this massive issuance of more unpayable debt wouldn’t solve anything. Their goal was to keep the global economy afloat so their banker owners and corporate masters would not have to accept the consequences of their criminal actions and could keep their pillaging of global wealth going unabated.

The issuance of debt and easy money policies of the Fed and their foreign central banker co-conspirators functioned to drive equity prices to all-time highs in 2015, but the debt issuance and money printing needs to increase exponentially in order keep stock markets rising. Once the QE spigot was shut off markets have flattened and are now falling hard. You can sense the desperation among the financial elite. The desperation is borne out by the frantic reckless measures taken by central bankers and politicians since 2008.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here Come the Money Helicopters!

February 11, 2016

Here Come the Money Helicopters!

The Negative Wealth Effect

Since the start of the year, the Dow is down about 7%. But certain stock market sectors have undergone a much harder pruning. First, energy… then the tech… and now banks. Shares in too-big-to-fail bank Citigroup are down almost 28% so far this year. And shares in Europe’s biggest bank, Deutsche Bank, are down by more than 36%.

As always, we don’t know where this leads.

But as we warned at the start of the year, it could be the beginning of a serious bear market. And more! As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson put it, the stock market has famously predicted nine out of the last five recessions. Further study shows that a stock market plunge of 10% has about a 50% probability of presaging a recession… 100% of the time!

Hope that’s clear.

But a stock market plunge not only predicts trouble in the economy; it also causes it. The Fed’s treasured “wealth effect” – in which investors, seeing the value of their portfolios rise, feel richer and rush out and spend – works in both directions. When stock prices fall, investors pull back on spending, and the economy goes into a cold funk.

The further stocks fall… the more the likelihood that the economy will follow. This has the central planners worried.

Pushing on a String

Here’s the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, Martin Wolf:

What might central banks do if the next recession hit while interest rates were still far below pre-2008 levels? As a paper from the London-based Resolution Foundation argues, this is highly likely. Central banks need to be prepared for this eventuality.

How?

The most important part of such preparation is to convince the public that they know what to do.

Good luck with that!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A 918 Point Stock Market Crash In Japan And Deutsche Bank Denies That It Is About To Collapse

February 10, 2016

A 918 Point Stock Market Crash In Japan And Deutsche Bank Denies That It Is About To Collapse

On Tuesday junk bonds continued to crash, the price of oil briefly dipped below 28 dollars a barrel, Deutsche Bank was forced to deny that it is on the verge of collapse, but the biggest news was what happened in Japan. The Nikkei was down a staggering 918 points, but that stock crash made very few headlines in the western world. If the Dow had crashed 918 points today, that would have been the largest single day point crash in all of U.S. history. So what just happened in Japan is a really big deal. The Nikkei is now down 23.1 percent from the peak of the market, and that places it solidly in bear market territory. Overall, a total of 16.5 trillion dollars of global stock market wealth has been wiped out since the middle of 2015. As I stated yesterday, this is what a global financial crisis looks like.

Just as we saw during the last financial crisis, the big banks are playing a starring role, and this is definitely true in Japan. Right now, Japanese banking stocks are absolutely imploding, and this is what drove much of the panic last night. The following numbers come from Wolf Richter…

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plunged 8.7%, down 47% from June 2015.
Mizuho Financial Group plunged 6.2%, down 38% since June 2015.
Sumitomo Mitsui plunged 6.2%, down 26% since May 2015
Nomura plunged a juicy 9.1%, down 42% since June 2015

A lot of analysts have been very focused on the downturn in China in recent months, but I think that it is much more important to watch Japan right now.

I have become fully convinced that the Japanese financial system is going to play a central role in the initial stages of this new global financial meltdown, and so I encourage everyone to keep a close eye on the Nikkei every single night.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deutsche Bank Is Scared: “What Needs To Be Done” In Its Own Words

February 9, 2016

Deutsche Bank Is Scared: “What Needs To Be Done” In Its Own Words

It all started in mid/late 2014, when the first whispers of a Fed rate hike emerged, which in turn led to relentless increase in the value of the US dollar and the plunge in the price of oil and all commodities, unleashing the worst commodity bear market in history.

The immediate implication of these two concurrent events was missed by most, although we wrote about it and previewed the implications in November of that year in “How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed.”

The conclusion was simple: Fed tightening and the resulting plunge in commodity prices, would lead (as it did) to the collapse of the great petrodollar cycle which had worked efficiently for 18 years and which led to petrodollar nations serving as a source of demand for $10 trillion in US assets, and when finished, would result in the Quantitative Tightening which has offset all central bank attempts to inject liquidity in the markets, a tightening which has since been unleashed by not only most emerging markets and petro-exporters but most notably China, and whose impact has been to not only pressure stocks lower but bring economic growth across the entire world to a grinding halt.

The second, and just as important development, was observed in early 2015: 11 months ago we wrote that “The Global Dollar Funding Shortage Is Back With A Vengeance And “This Time It’s Different” and followed up on it later in the year in “Global Dollar Funding Shortage Intensifies To Worst Level Since 2012” a problem which has manifested itself most notably in Africa where as we wrote recently, virtually every petroleum exporting nation has run out of actual physical dollars.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After Crashing, Deutsche Bank Is Forced To Issue Statement Defending Its Liquidity

February 8, 2016

After Crashing, Deutsche Bank Is Forced To Issue Statement Defending Its Liquidity

The echoes of both Bear and Lehman are growing louder with every passing day.

Just hours after Deutsche Bank stock crashed by 10% to levels not seen since the financial crisis, the German behemoth with over $50 trillion in gross notional derivative found itself in the very deja vuish, not to mention unpleasant, situation of having to defend its liquidity and specifically assuring investors that it has enough cash (about €1 billion in 2016 payment capacity), to pay the €350 million in maturing Tier 1 coupons due in April, which among many other reasons have seen billions in value wiped out from both DB’s stock price and its contingent convertible bonds which are looking increasingly more like equity with every passing day.

DB did not stop there, but also laid out that for 2017 it was about €4.3BN in payment capacity, however before the impact of 2016 results, which if recent record loss history is any indication, will severely reduce the full cash capacity of the German bank.

From the just issued press release:

Ad-hoc: Deutsche Bank publishes updated information about AT1 payment capacity

Frankfurt am Main, 8 February 2016 – Today Deutsche Bank published updated information related to its 2016 and 2017 payment capacity for Additional Tier 1 (AT1) coupons based on preliminary and unaudited figures.

The 2016 payment capacity is estimated to be approximately EUR 1 billion, sufficient to pay AT1 coupons of approximately EUR 0.35 billion on 30 April 2016.

The estimated pro-forma 2017 payment capacity is approximately EUR 4.3 billion before impact from 2016 operating results. This is driven in part by an expected positive impact of approximately EUR 1.6 billion from the completion of the sale of 19.99% stake in Hua Xia Bank and further HGB 340e/g reserves of approximately EUR 1.9 billion available to offset future losses.

The final AT1 payment capacity will depend on 2016 operating results under German GAAP (HGB) and movements in other reserves.

The updated information in question:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Pandora’s Box Is Open”: Why Japan May Have Started A ‘Silent Bank Run’

January 30, 2016

“Pandora’s Box Is Open”: Why Japan May Have Started A ‘Silent Bank Run’

As extensively discussed yesterday in the aftermath of the BOJ’s stunning decision to cut rates to negative for the first time in history (a decision which it appears was taken due to Davos peer pressure, a desire to prop up stock markets and to punish Yen longs, and an inability to further boost QE), there will be consequences – some good, mostly bad.

As Goldman’s Naohiko Baba previously explained, NIRP in Japan will not actually boost the economy: “we do have concerns about the policy transmission channel. Policy Board Member Koji Ishida, who voted against the new measures, said that “a further decline in JGB yields would not have significantly positive effects on economy activity.” We concur with this sentiment, particularly for capex. The key determinants of capex in Japan are the expected growth rate and uncertainty about the future as seen by corporate management according to our analysis, while the impact of real long-term rates has weakened markedly in recent years.”

What the BOJ’s NIRP will do, is result in a one-time spike in risk assets, something global stock and bond markets have already experienced, and a brief decline in the Yen, one which traders can’t wait to fade as Citi FX’s Brent Donnelly explained yesterday.

NIRP will also have at most two other “positive” consequences, which according to Deutsche Bank include 1) reinforcing financial institutions’ decisions to grant new loans and invest in securities (if only in theory bnecause as explained further below in practice this may very well backfire); and 2) widening interest rate differentials to weaken JPY exchange rates, which in turn support companies’ JPY-based sales and profit, for whom a half of consolidated sales are from overseas.

That covers the positive. The NIRP negatives are far more troubling. The first one we already noted yesterday, when Goldman speculated that launching NIRP could mean that further QE is all tapped out:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Disturbing Reasons Why The Bank Of Japan Stunned Everyone With Negative Rates

January 29, 2016

The Disturbing Reasons Why The Bank Of Japan Stunned Everyone With Negative Rates

As we noted earlier, in a paradoxical U-turn, one which caught everyone by surprise as a result of Kuroda’s own promise just one week ago not to engage in NIRP…

… and two months after the ECB’s December 3 disappointing announcement led to a historic surge in the EUR, today countless macro hedge funds have been left reeling with huge losses once again, as many had recently turned bullish on the Yen…

… only to be eviscerated by the BOJ’s negative rates announcement.

So what happened? Reuters has an amusing take, one which we doubt many macro HFs will find quite entertaining:

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda used classic shock tactics on Friday to push through his latest unconventional monetary policy of negative rates: deny, then strike.

The paradox, of course, is that by “striking”, Kuroda slammed precisely those who were meant to benefit the most from the BOJ’s action: financial institutions. To be sure, it is not just hedge funds who will be left reeling but Japanese banks themselves, because as a result of negative rates, their NIM will go horizontal and lead to even more pronounced losses, something European banks – such as Deutsche Bank – have discovered the hard way over the past year and a half.

There are other problems with the BOJ’s seemingly chaotic, if not panicked, decision: as Reuters adds, “a razor-thin 5-4 vote underscores the difficulty Kuroda had in winning enough board backing for his shock tactic, and illustrates the doubts among board members about the governor’s line that by sticking to a 2 percent inflation goal the BOJ can make people believe prices will rise.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chart Of The Day: 155 Years Of Real ($2015) Oil Prices——-Average=$47

January 27, 2016

Chart Of The Day: 155 Years Of Real ($2015) Oil Prices——-Average=$47

Attention Finally Turns To Saudi Arabia’s “Secret” US Treasury Holdings

January 22, 2016

Attention Finally Turns To Saudi Arabia’s “Secret” US Treasury Holdings

In November of 2014, we announced the quiet death of the petrodollar.

The system which underwrote decades of dollar dominance and kept a perpetual bid under USD assets met an untimely demise when the Saudis moved to bankrupt the US shale complex by deliberately suppressing oil prices.

The implications, we said, would be far-reaching.

For years, oil producing nations plowed their USD crude proceeds into USTs and other dollar assets in a virtuous loop both for the currency and for the nation that printed it. The “Great Accumulation” (as Deutsche Bank calls it) of USD FX reserves ended for good in early 2015 but no one noticed until China began to liquidate mountains of US paper in an attempt to manage a runaway devaluation effort.

By the start of September, all anyone wanted to talk about was the depletion of EM FX war chests as the world suddenly came to understand that the selling of FX reserves amounts to QE in reverse and might therefore serve to tighten global monetary conditions, drive up yields on core paper, and sap liquidity as traditional net exporters of capital suddenly stopped buying amid slumping commodity prices and the yuan fiasco. Some wondered if the reserve drawdowns would cause the Fed to delay liftoff as the FOMC would effectively be tightening into a tightening.

Against this backdrop we said that the most important chart in the world may well be one that depicts the combined FX reserves of Saudi Arabia and China.

Now that Saudi Arabia’s oil price gambit has backfired on the way to blowing a hole in the kingdom’s budget that amounted to 16% of GDP last year, the market is speculating that Riyadh’s vast SAMA reserves could disappear altogether – especially considering the added cost of funding the war in Yemen and maintaining the riyal peg.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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